fix(api): bound what a forged CF-Connecting-IP can buy
PR Checks / Frontend Typecheck + Tests (pull_request) Successful in 1m3s
PR Checks / Backend Smoke (pull_request) Successful in 8s
PR Checks / Build Backend (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 18s
PR Checks / Build Frontend (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 45s
PR Checks / Build Pipeline (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 10s
PR Checks / AI Code Review (Claude) (pull_request) Successful in 10s
PR Checks / Frontend Typecheck + Tests (pull_request) Successful in 1m3s
PR Checks / Backend Smoke (pull_request) Successful in 8s
PR Checks / Build Backend (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 18s
PR Checks / Build Frontend (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 45s
PR Checks / Build Pipeline (no push) (pull_request) Successful in 10s
PR Checks / AI Code Review (Claude) (pull_request) Successful in 10s
Code review, both findings valid. The design doc claimed Cloudflare "replaces the header, so a browser cannot forge it", and that only the X-Forwarded-For fallback was forgeable. That is true only for traffic that actually passed through Cloudflare, and nothing in this process can verify that it did. Reaching the origin directly, both headers are equally attacker-controlled — and rotating CF-Connecting-IP mints a fresh rate-limit bucket per request, defeating per-client limits on every endpoint including the DataFrame-heavy /api/schools. Against abuse that is worse than the shared bucket it replaced, which at least capped everyone together. So the ceiling comes back. I dropped it earlier arguing it belonged at Cloudflare; that argument assumed the keying was sound, and it is not. GlobalRateLimitMiddleware counts all /api/ traffic in a fixed window against a total, independent of client identity, outermost so it refuses before any work happens. Written by hand because slowapi cannot express a global cap: default_limits and application_limits are both keyed by key_func, and the latter needs middleware this app does not install. It does not make the header trustworthy — it makes trusting it survivable. The real fix is Authenticated Origin Pulls or an origin firewall, now documented in DEPLOY.md as the open gap it is. 127.0.0.1 is exempt: the healthcheck curls localhost from inside the container, and starving it would restart the container and turn a load spike into an outage loop. Keyed on the peer address, never the Host header, which the caller sets. Second finding: suggest_schools_typesense promised "never raises" while the parsing loop sat outside the try, so int(None) on a malformed document would have made a keystroke a 500. The loop now skips bad rows rather than dropping the whole list — and a hit with no document no longer becomes a suggestion pointing at /school/0. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
This commit is contained in:
1 parent
d2115364ae
commit
0fa1a292c7
8 files changed
+332
-50
No files matched your search
@@ -151,6 +151,36 @@ needed), and fails the check only when a finding is rated
|
||||
**severe** (would break prod, leak data, or corrupt data). Minor findings are
|
||||
informational and never block a merge.
|
||||
|
||||
## Rate limiting, and the Cloudflare gap
|
||||
|
||||
Two independent limits protect the API:
|
||||
|
||||
- **Per client**, via slowapi, keyed on `CF-Connecting-IP` (falling back to
|
||||
`X-Forwarded-For`, then the peer address). 60/minute by default;
|
||||
`/api/suggest` gets 120/minute because typing is bursty.
|
||||
- **Globally**, via `GlobalRateLimitMiddleware`: a fixed 60-second window over
|
||||
all `/api/` traffic, `GLOBAL_RATE_LIMIT_PER_MINUTE` (default 3000),
|
||||
independent of any client identity. Requests from `127.0.0.1` are exempt so
|
||||
the container healthcheck cannot be starved into a restart loop.
|
||||
|
||||
### Open: the origin must only accept Cloudflare
|
||||
|
||||
`CF-Connecting-IP` is only meaningful for requests that actually reached the
|
||||
origin through Cloudflare, and **the application cannot verify that they did**.
|
||||
Anything able to reach the origin directly can set that header freely and, by
|
||||
rotating it, mint a fresh rate-limit bucket per request — defeating per-client
|
||||
limits on every endpoint.
|
||||
|
||||
The global ceiling bounds the damage to total origin capacity. It does not fix
|
||||
the underlying gap, and nothing in the code can. Closing it needs one of:
|
||||
|
||||
- **Authenticated Origin Pulls** — Cloudflare presents a client certificate the
|
||||
origin requires, so non-Cloudflare traffic is refused at TLS.
|
||||
- **An origin firewall** restricted to Cloudflare's published IP ranges.
|
||||
|
||||
Until one is in place, treat per-client limits as protection against accidents
|
||||
and ordinary load, not against a determined caller.
|
||||
|
||||
## Feature flags (Unleash)
|
||||
|
||||
Flag state lives in a self-hosted Unleash instance, deployed as its own
|
||||
|
||||
Reference in new issue
Block a user